![]() ![]() When he leaped and waggled his arms, it was less a Belushi-style spontaneous barbaric soul-explosion than a precisely calibrated sequence built up, gesture by gesture, with the patience of a mathematical proof. ![]() (It’s unclear why this is in the past tense.) Every aspect of his famous wackiness, it turns out, was precisely calculated-he was a rationalist of the absurd. “My look was strictly wholesome Baptist,” he writes. Excluding a brief flirtation with hippie-ism, Martin settled early on his iconic look: clean-shaven, with a neat suit to match his neatly parted hair. He gave up his only real countercultural indulgence, marijuana, after a panic attack in a movie theater. At college, he got A’s in philosophy and puritanically renounced the wearing of jeans. He honed his comic chops working at Disneyland. Instead, the great revelation of Born Standing Up-a chronicle that stretches from Martin’s childhood magic tricks to his post– Saturday Night Live super-fame-is that, unlike Robin Williams (whose mania seems organic and genuinely debilitating) or Richard Pryor (who famously lit himself on fire while freebasing cocaine), Martin did not live the shamanistic high life of seventies comedy. ![]() You might expect a memoir of Steve Martin’s wild-and-crazy stand-up years to be a vomit-soaked monument to seventies excess, a tale of vision quests, diarrhea bongs, bad perms, handlebar mustaches, luge races down the hills of San Francisco in garbage cans full of bodily fluids, and marathon orgies with generations of Belushis. ![]()
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